I always try to look at areas where there is a fundamental technology shift. Right now, the most fundamental technology shift is the advance in large language models. In all honesty, I am a bit out of my league on the topic. I am also afraid that it is also going to be difficult for university researchers to play a leading role in this space because of the need for access to huge amounts of computing power to process massive amounts of data. I hope that I am wrong, but that is what it looks to me. Countries must invest in the computing infrastructure needed to sustain open research in this domain.
For my own work, I am intrigued by the advances in memory and storage systems. We have gone from the conventional “caches in front of DRAM” architecture to one in which there are a variety of different memory systems, some of them disaggregated. In the storage arena, new technologies allow access to nonvolatile storage at a fraction of the latency and at a multiple of the bandwidth of what was possible with earlier technologies. There is ample room for good computer systems research in this space.
More About Willy Zwaenepoel
Willy Zwaenepoel received the BS/MS from Ghent University in 1979, and the MS and Ph.D. from Stanford University, in 1980 and 1984, respectively. He is currently dean of engineering at the University of Sydney. Previously, he was on the faculty at Rice University and head of the School of computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL.
He has made fundamental contributions to experimental computer science, including groundbreaking work on microkernels, group communication, fault tolerance, distributed shared memory, Internet servers, I/O virtualization, graph computation, and storage systems. In each area, he is credited with breakthrough results.
He was elected IEEE Fellow in 1998, ACM Fellow in 2000, and ATSE Fellow in 2021. He received numerous awards for his teaching and research, including the 209 IEEE Kanai Award, the 2019 Eurosys Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2023 IEEE Outstanding Technical Achievement in Distributed Processing Award, and nine best paper awards at conferences including DSN, Eurosys, OSDI, Sigcomm and OSDI. He also received the 2001 Rice University Graduate Student Association Teaching Award.
He has been successful in translating his research into industrial practice. His TreadMarks distributed shared memory system was licensed by Intel and became the basis for Intel’s cluster OpenMP Product. He has been involved with several startups including iMimic (acquired by Ironport/Cisco), Bugbuster (acquired by AppDynamics/Cisco), Nutanix (Nasdaq: NTNX), and Grainite (acquired by MongoDB).